Consciousness and Illusion: Does Illusionism Threaten a Human

Abstract

Illusionism is a relatively recent theory of consciousness that has absorbed and consistently developed physicalist intuitions about consciousness. This approach gives sufficient grounds to consider it contrary to the basic ideas of realists regarding phenomenal consciousness, because according to illusionism there is no phenomenal consciousness, it is just an illusion. The author believes that the danger of this thesis for realists depends on which concept of illusion to adhere to. After a brief review of the illusionist approach, the article presents two possible contents of the concept of the illusion of phenomenality. The author then considers whether realists cannot agree with any of them. One of the possible understandings of illusion is the conceptual distortion of the data of experience or introspection in the course of their interpretation. Although this view is not basic for illusionists, it is implicitly and sometimes explicitly contained in their examples and arguments. In this case, realists can agree that phenomenal consciousness is an illusion, not only without weakening their position, but also emphasizing the special status of phenomenality, which allows a person to expand reality when faced with what is not in the world. When an illusion is understood as a distortion by introspection itself, before any conceptual reactions to its data, the position of illusionists turns out to be much more dangerous for phenomenal consciousness. However, even in this case, realists can introduce a number of counterarguments to which illusionism does not yet have answers acceptable to both sides. Although this discussion is complicated by ambiguities in the relation of definitions of key terms of representatives of these two approaches, which complicates its analysis, the author comes to the conclusion that realism has a chance, if not to adapt the illusion, then to demonstrate the problems and gaps of the illusionist position in connection with this concept.